The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

Life was elsewhere, and it was frightening and vast and mountainous and uncomfortable.

There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful,

There is a point—for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago—when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.

and in what I could not see I saw everything I had ever feared.

it was soothing to be with someone for whom life was a series of the familiar, whose every problem was solvable, who could find such pleasure in the everyday.

as if I were floating away from myself, my atoms rearranging themselves so that they were no more permanent or tangible than sunlight,

as if my life—which had begun to seem something not my own but rather something into which I found myself blindly toppling—was indeed something living, that existed without my knowledge but that pulled me along in its strong, insistent undertow.